Re: >H The Biology of Zen (MIT book announcement)

[Remi Sussan <rsussan@yahoo.com>]

Transhuman Mailing List



"J. R. Molloy" wrote:
> 
> Transhuman Mailing List
> 
> Save you money. Austin sums up the whole book in one paragraph on page 697:
> 
> "Have we learned anything about meditation? If so, it will not be from
> applying EEG electrodes to the scalp, but from the deeper act of practicing
> the meditative mode ourselves and infusing it into the present moment.
> Finally, each day's practice starts to become life's meditation, by one
> life, within all life."
> 
> I agree, except that you can't "practice" meditation.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
I didn't read this book (but will probably do), but I fear that, one
more time, Zen is identified with a quiet state of sat meditation (the
"soto" variant), although at the beginnings, Zen precisely dismissed
this kind of practice as a way to awakening, and preferred to use a kind
of "shock therapy" (The Lin-Tsi-Rinzai variant, who was very critical
about "sat meditation", or Za-Zen). there is, IMHO, much more
relationships between Zen satori and ethological concept of "insight"
(or Gregory Bateson Learning III: learning to learn to learn) that with
"psychedelic experience" of odd states of consciousness (although these
states may certainly be interesting and fun  by themselves).
-- 
Remi Sussan
http://perso.cybercable.fr/tlon/

_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

***************************************************************************
* If you need to unsubscribe, send email saying "unsubscribe transhuman"  *
* to majordomo@logrus.org, without the quotes, from the SAME email address*
* as the one you subscribed under! Yes, it is case-sensitive. Don't blame *
* the admin for your spelling errors.                                     *
*                  Please email all technical problems to                 *
*               owner-transhuman@logrus.org, NOT to the list.             *
* Shameless plug: http://gerol.us.itd.umich.edu/                          *
***************************************************************************